As network connectivity has continued its explosive growth and digital storage has become smaller, faster, and less expensive, the quantity of electronically-accessible resources has increased enormously. So much so that the discovery and location of the available resources has become a critical problem. These electronically-accessible resources can be digital content (e.g., digital images, video and audio) which may be available over the network, web-based resources (e.g., HTML/XML documents) and electronic devices (e.g., printers, displays, etc.) In addition, there are electronically-accessible catalogues of other resources, which may not be electronically accessible (e.g., books, analog film media, etc.). What is needed is a consistent method of describing resources so that location of resources, electronically-accessible or otherwise, can be more readily achieved.
The problems of consistent resource description are twofold. First, there is the problem of acceptance of a standard (consistent) method of resource description. The second problem is related to the generation of descriptions. Often the cost of this process is significant.
The ready adoption of HTML browsers for the purposes for browsing and locating textual information indicates that humans like to browse for information. Currently, however no form of generic browsing of non-textual electronically-accessible resources exists. For example, browsing of a library of text documents is typically enabled using an HTML browser by providing a table of contents and then linking the relevant HTML (textual) documents to anchors in an HTML document. Currently, there is no general way of browsing through a library containing, for example, digital video resources. For such browsing to be enabled it is necessary to have a consistent way of describing resources in much the same way that HTML provides a consistent way of representing textual information.
If a consistent method of describing resources can be achieved then consistent methods of selecting resource descriptions from formulated queries can be contemplated.
Furthermore, it is also possible to develop methods and build devices that facilitate resource discovery, understanding and presentation. Resources can be composite items involving other resources and can include schedules for presentation, delivery and/or consumption. Video presentations can therefore be viewed as just another electronically-accessible resource and as such can be described in a similar way to items of digital content (like images, video and audio). The description of the video presentation effectively provides an efficient encoding for the presentation.